Protests outside a St. Louis Cardinals game Saturday brought out arguments and racist taunts from some baseball fans.

Around 100 demonstrators gathered at Ballpark Village Saturday night to mark the three-year anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, Jr. and to protest a white nationalist tiki-torch rally Friday and confrontation Saturday on the campus of University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.

Protesters in St. Louis chanted “This is what democracy looks like!” and “The whole damn system is guilty as hell!” outside the Cardinals’ game against the Atlanta Braves. Protesters were calling attention to racism in the US in the context of Mike Brown’s shooting death by Ferguson, MO police officer and the white nationalist rally.

Stltoday.com reports that baseball fans leaving the game got into several “confrontations” with protesters. In one incident, onlooking police intervened as one man yelled at protesters. Another man argued with protesters and provoked them with a Nazi salute, and when leaving, used an obscene gesture as he told following protesters to leave him alone. Yet another fan shouted “All lives matter!” at demonstrators.

Officials at Busch Stadium stated that there were no injuries in the clashes at Ballpark Village.

This is in stark contrast to the months of protests in Ferguson following Michael Brown, Jr.’s shooting death by former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, in which protesters were tear gassed, tased, shot with rubber bullets, and violently arrested by police outfitted with military equipment.

Tensions also ensued at the white nationalist riot in Charlottesville which saw violence as well, in which the gathering of KKK members, Nazis, Confederates and others, exchanged words with protesters. The demonstrations resulted in one fatality, when a car plowed into a group of people protesting against the white nationalists.

St. Louis protesters eventually left Ballpak Village and briefly marched downtown. They dispersed around 10:15pm.

“…shout out to all the ‘trannies (which is a derogatory term for transgender people)’ out there…” This epithet was used more than once.

“This might sound messed up but I don’t care… she dyin’…”

“There should be some kind of repercussions for that (a transgender person having sex with someone without telling that person they are transgender)… until then, Ima have my own repercussions.”

“…I said that if one did that to me, and they didn’t tell me, Ima be so mad I’m probably gonna want to kill them…”

These are all things that comedian Lil Duval said during an interview on “The Breakfast Club” radio show of a hypothetical posed to him by DJ Envy. The scenario contemplated if he dated and had sex with a transgender person before she revealed to him that she was transgender. Deliberation time: 0.00.

He said that raggedy mess with his mouth, and not just his mind, in a world full of human beings.

Now according to the video of the interview, there were times where hosts Angela Yee, Charlemagne tha God and DJ Envy tried to reel in his advocacy of real violence as a result of a hypothetical. But Lil Duval didn’t take the hint.

But they didn’t go far enough to defend the humanity of transgender persons, especially Janet Mock, a transgender activist, author and advocate who was a guest on the show the week prior, who they used as a prop to generate that conversation.

For the record, transgender human beings are much more than just sex. Our assumptions and misgivings may seem real to us, but they are not based in reality. Hate to break it to us, but those hypothetical random sexual encounters supposedly perpetrated by transgender persons are far more a product of the willfully ignorant American collective imagination than they are anecdotes of actual occurrences. They don’t at all define this group, many of whom are Black and Brown, that too many people believe are salaciously attempting to force themselves on fourth tier comedians, fragile men in various stages of hygiene crisis, and school age children.

And yes, many transgender persons are Black and Brown, particularly those who are consistently victims of abuse and violence.

In the real world, you can’t just go around saying you “would” or “would like to” or “probably would” do harm to people and not expect some kind of reaction.

If you had a sister, and someone used a national medium to publicly threaten harm against your sister, how would you feel? What would you do? It doesn’t matter why she was threatened. But you wouldn’t like that, her friends wouldn’t like it, and people that identify with her wouldn’t like it. Well, it goes without saying you’re not the only one who feels this way.

And if I heard someone say on national radio, “Mane, I’d probably wanna kill (enter your name) sister…” I’d have a REAL problem with that too.

A friend condensed it for me. Many people are tolerant of hate speech because it isn’t directed toward them. They allow it, and declare it’s not a big deal, because “they’re not talking to me.”

But that’s part of the reason the world is the way it is now. Some of us lack empathy, not recognizing that our same kind of different can be subject to subjugation at any given time. For real though… How does it look Black folk persecuting OTHER Black folk ‘cuz they don’t look like the Black folk were used to? Where ‘dey do that at? Apparently, all over.

But this is the same lack of empathy that demoralized Black and Brown skin, enslaved a continent, and colonized most Brown people around the world. So it’s our choice to be like the oppressor, or be a different kind of different.

Oh! and while we’re on the subject of transphobia/homophobia… Several conscious folk have attempted to intentionally misinterpret this term by suggesting “I’m not AFRAID of gay or transgender people.” While we’re clear that the phoneme “-phobia” is defined as “fear,” the “fear” in these situations is better characterized as “anger toward,” “anxiety of,” “resentment about,” “misunderstanding concerning,” “lack of empathy for” and/or “opposition against,” in this case, people who love others of the same gender or trans persons.

So let’s kill the little fragile straw man so we can understand each other. Peace.

On Wednesday, prosecuting attorney Scott Ellington deemed the July 25 police shooting and killing of 16 year old Arkansas youth, Aries Clark, justified. Clark is Black and the two officers who fired their weapons, Brannon Hinkle and Wesley Smith, are White.

According to a letter Ellington wrote to the Arkansas State Police, the officers “ordered, cajoled, encouraged and begged” Clark to drop a weapon that was later identified as a BB gun.

The standoff took nearly ten minutes by the East Arkansas Youth Services building in the city of Marion. According to theroot.com, Clark had been in DHS custody for less than a week as his family worked to resolve some internal issues. Clark had run away from the facility and the police standoff began after he returned. Video footage shows Clark moving towards police and pointing his gun at them.

According to the killed by police database (www.killedbypolice.net), by August 9, 748 individuals have been killed by police in 2017. August 9 is also the three year anniversary of the killing of Michael Brown by then Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Michael Brown was unarmed at the time.

According to hollywoodblackrenaissance.com, Spelman College recently appointed renowned movie director Julie Dash as a Distinguished Professor in the Arts starting this fall.

Dash is most well known for her groundbreaking film, Daughters of the Dust, which tells the story of a South Carolina Gullah community that has to navigate ways to hold on to their ancestral traditions while also preapring themselves for the rigors of a move to the industrial North.

The movie unabashedly uses Gullah dialect (which draws heavily from West African languages and culture) and was named one of the most important cinematic achievements in Black Cinema at the 25th Annual Newark Black Film Festival in 1999. More recently, in 2004, it was selected among 400 other films to be added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry as a National Treasure.

Dash will make an appropriate fit for Spelman College as the Atlanta-based all-women’s college is one of the few HBCUs (or colleges of its size) that offers a degree in film. In 2004, award-winning filmmaker Ayoka Chenzira created the Digital Moving Image Salon (DMIS) to instruct students on how to create their own movies. Since their founding, they have created the Reel Women Film Showcase, which has featured prominent Black women in film for screenings and panel discussions open to the general public.

Spelman has also created a documentary filmmaking major, to, according to their website, cultivate a “generation of Black women documentary filmmakers who see the world through their histories and interests.”

The appointment of Dash and the development of Spelman’s film program is extremely timely as Atlanta has been dubbed the new “Black Hollywood” by some. According to FilmL.A., Georgia has become the number one filming location in the world, having produced the most films in 2016. The various film and television shows produced in Georgia is estimated to to generate $9.5 billion to the state in 2017.

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